What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

In Love Wins, Rob Bell confronted the troubling questions that many people of faith are afraid to ask about heaven, hell, fate, and faith. Using the same inspired, inquisitive approach, he now turns to our most sacred book: the Bible. What Is the Bible? provides insights and answers that make clear why the Bible is so revered and what makes it truly inspiring and essential to our lives. Rob takes us deep into actual passages to reveal the humanity behind the Scriptures.

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

How God is described today strikes many as mean, primitive, backwards, illogical, tribal, and at odds with the frontiers of science. At the same time, many intuitively feel a sense of reverence and awe in the world. Can we find a new way to talk about God? Pastor and New York Times best-selling author Rob Bell shows how traditional ideas have grown stale and dysfunctional and reveals a new path for how to return vitality and vibrancy to how we understand God.

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

Millions of Christians have struggled with how to reconcile God's love and God's judgment: Has God created billions of people over thousands of years only to select a few to go to heaven and everyone else to suffer forever in hell? Is this acceptable to God? How is this "good news"? Author, pastor, and innovative teacher Rob Bell presents a deeply biblical vision for rediscovering a richer, grander, truer, and more spiritually satisfying way of understanding heaven, hell, God, Jesus, salvation, and repentance.

Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile

There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers. It's a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity, It's about what happens when Christians support, animate, and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living

Each of us was created for something great - we just need to figure out what it is and find the courage to do it. Whether it's writing the next great American novel, starting a business, or joining a band, Rob Bell wants to help us make those dreams become reality. Our path is ours and ours alone to pursue, he reminds us, and in doing so we derive great joy because we are living our passions.

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

In Finding God in the Waves, "Science Mike" draws on his personal experience to tell the unlikely story of how science led him back to faith. Among other revelations, we learn what brain scans reveal about what happens when we pray; how fundamentalism affects the psyche; and how God is revealed not only in scripture but in the night sky, in subatomic particles, and in us.

The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage

Rob and Kristin Bell introduce a startling new way of looking at marriage, The Zimzum of Love. Zimzum is a Hebrew term where God, in order to have a relationship with the world, contracts, creating space for the creation to exist. In marriage, zimzum is the dynamic energy field between two partners, in which each person contracts to allow the other to flourish. Mastering this field, this give and take of energy, is the secret to what makes marriage flourish.

Bitten by a Camel: Leaving Church, Finding God

Kent Dobson climbed Mount Sinai in search of the God who had eluded him. Instead he got bitten by a camel. Dobson was climbing the ladder of Christianity, too: a worship leader, teacher, and ultimately senior pastor of one of the largest and most prominent churches in America. But he was growing disillusioned with the faith, at least inside the shell of organized religion.

The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction

Whether listeners are devout believers or distant seekers, The Idolatry of God shows that we must lay down our certainties and honestly admit our doubts to identify with Jesus. Rollins purposely upsets fundamentalist certainty in order to open listeners up to a more loving, active manifestation of Christ’s love. In contrast to the usual understanding of the "Good News" as a message offering satisfaction and certainty, Rollins argues for a radical and shattering alternative. He explores how the Good News actually involves embracing the idea that we can’t be whole, that life is difficult, and that we are in the dark.

The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales

For so many, the Christian faith is viewed as little more than a drug that enables the weak to escape reality. An opiate that helps its users to avoid facing the injustice of the world and making a stand against it. In short, the Christian faith is perceived to be a counter-revolutionary ideology that keeps people passive, infantile, and ineffectual. In contrast, Peter Rollins has crafted a series of parables that shatter this popular perception.

The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

Trained as an evangelical Bible scholar, Peter Enns loved the Scriptures and shared his devotion by teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary. But the further he studied the Bible, the more he found himself confronted by questions that could neither be answered within the rigid framework of his religious instruction nor be accepted among the conservative evangelical community.

Insurrection: To Believe is Human. To Doubt, Divine.

In this incendiary new work, the controversial author and speaker Peter Rollins proclaims that the Christian faith is not primarily concerned with questions regarding life after death but with the possibility of life before death. In order to unearth this truth, Rollins prescribes a radical and wholesale critique of contemporary Christianity that he calls pyro-theology.

The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

The Trinity is supposed to be the central doctrine grounding Christianity, yet we're often told that we shouldn't attempt to understand it because it's a mystery. But what if we breached that mystery? How might it transform our relationship with God?

With compelling and often humorous stories from his own life, Bible scholar Peter Enns offers a fresh look at how Christian life truly works, answering questions that cannot be addressed by the idealized traditional doctrine of "once for all delivered to the saints".

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

In the first half of life, we are naturally preoccupied with establishing ourselves; climbing, achieving, and performing. But as we grow older and encounter challenges and mistakes, we need to see ourselves in a different and more life-giving way. This message of falling down - that is in fact moving upward - is the most resisted and counterintuitive of messages in the world's religions. Falling Upward offers a new paradigm for understanding one of the most profound of life's mysteries: how those who have fallen down are the only ones who understand "up".

Blue Like Jazz: Non-Religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God.

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals - church culture seemed so far removed from Jesus. Yet despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing her back. And so she set out on a journey to understand the Church and to find her place in it.

Publisher's Summary

"We have to test everything. I thank God for anybody anywhere who is pointing people to the mysteries of God. But those people would all tell you to think long and hard about what they are saying and doing and creating. Test it. Probe it. Do that to this book. Don't swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it.

"Just because I'm a Christian and I'm trying to articulate a Christian worldview, doesn't mean I've got it nailed. I'm contributing to the discussion. God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?" Rob Bell

I read this book 8-10 years ago and probably loved it more this time on audio. Rob's cadence of ideas and insights on a version of a Liberating-Fun-Loving-Downcast-Friend to Degenerates Jesus....is my kind of Jesus.

I have always loved Rob Bell. I was lucky to live in Michigan in the heyday of Mars Hill and hear him speak there once back in 1999. I hate that he has become largely misunderstood and misquoted over the years. This book, like all of his teachings, somehow reveal and create a picture of Jesus that deep down you already know exists, but few are as bold or able to make so real. Rob has done for Christianity what Tiger Woods has done for golf: brought it to a whole new level. I think a lot of modern church planters are afraid to admit the impact he has had on the progressive Evangical movement. Reading this makes me actually want to be a Christian again! If you can get past some of the microphone hissing here and there, the insights will forever haunt your understandings of scripture.

Powerful thoughts to ponder. Most know that the Christian church in America has been missing the point for a while now. This book helps to put your finger on it. Very challenging, liberating & refreshing.

This book radically changed my life and continues to challenge everything I grew up with. this book gave me spring theology and the reason why Jesus is good for me today. I decided to start living to love other people because of this book. I gives me wings. Rob, thank you for sharing your heart and passion. I am a better man because of you.

This book is truly amaxing, Rob Bell knows the Bible well, he explains it and Christianity in a way anyone can understand. His book Love Wins, made hunger for more, so I bought Velvet Elvis and it's my favorite. Rob' Bell has a quirky sense of humor that makes his books and his interviews fun to watch/listen to.